Saying you want to win isn’t enough. You need to act like it. You can’t assume you’ll stop making mistakes in your micro decisions & your opponents won’t. The highest level of competition is leveling-up their gameplay everyday, fixating on even the smallest of mistakes. If you hope to catch up, you need to do the same. Lastly, stop playing bad decks. Good players play good cards.

This week: How to act like you actually want to win, and what you need to do to level up your Riftbound gameplay.

Let’s get into it.

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“Eventually I am going to stop making mistakes and all my opponents are going to die!” - Cedric Phillips

By Drake Sasser

Welcome back, readers! One of the unique positions writing for this newsletter puts me in is that the audience spans a range of card games, not just Magic. Conveniently, however, the lessons learned through years of grinding Magic port seamlessly to other games as well!

Before retiring from the competitive grind entirely I did a stint in paid coaching for Magic players looking to do more winning and many of the introductory lessons can be distilled into a set of baseline lessons I intend to offer periodically under the series title that bears the abbreviated theme: if you want to win, act like it! Today we are going to focus on the first of this series centered on getting yourself to step out of your comfort zone and play the deck that gives you the best chance to win.

As a quick disclaimer before we dive in, this article is going to ignore cost as a factor, as it should rarely come up for folks who are driving or even flying to events. Grinding competitive events is typically an expensive, luxury hobby. Please do not attempt to grind events without the disposable funds and spare time to do so as you are setting yourself up for failure. Real life stressors will crater your mental game and card games are “pay to compete” and can be extremely expensive.

One of the most intoxicating things about Magic is the sense of identity you can find within the game. Specific cards, archetypes, commanders, or even formats create niche subcommunities with their own hierarchies and icons. Becoming involved in these communities is a great way to get involved with the game on a deeper level and start to level up about specific decks or play patterns in a welcoming environment where it feels like your community vs. everyone. Even in the absence of the community aspect, just finding a deck or card you like a lot and desire to play with in as many contexts as possible can create this sense of identity too. As you level up as a player though, this very facet of the game that drew you in deeper also starts to hold you back. Unless you are one of the very few lucky individuals who got deeply involved in a deck that happens to be the best deck in a given format, the allure of playing your pet deck is enticing, but to be ignored. In reality, just playing the best deck in the format is almost always the correct move even on little or no reps.

Even among experienced play groups I have tested with, the value of experience with weaker decks can be vastly overvalued. Sought advisors wanting to avoid blame for steering you astray with a recommendation to play a different deck and potentially be forced to defend their answer, commonly recommend that a conflicted player play what they already know and enjoy to maximize their odds of having a good time. However, this idea to “hedge your bets on fun” by getting to lose with a deck you enjoy playing if you do lose is entirely worthless if your goal is to win, and honestly never really manifests either. Losing sucks, almost no matter what. The biggest factor I have found in alleviating the sting of losing is losing to good, polite, and fun opponents, which is entirely agnostic of the deck. But all of the arguments for playing what you know are sirens of the mind, lulling you into believing that staying in your comfort zone is also strategically correct, when it is instead very rarely the case.

Now, it is possible that there is something exploitable about the metagame, and you should always cast a wide net when playtesting, but come time to lock in a deck you need to have a very real, evidence-based reason not to play the best deck or perceived best deck in a format, and experience with a lesser deck does not come close to clearing that bar.

This fallacy got me good for a long time. I don’t really want to expose exactly how long but suffice it to say it's measured in years. Whether it is rooted in a paralyzing fear of embarrassing myself playing against good players or is just another reskinning of the comfort zone ball and chain is unclear to me, but this narrative had a death grip on me for a frustratingly long time. It felt like it made so much sense! Instead of trying to “brute force” wins by fighting good players on their own turf with the best deck, I pictured myself as a David figure sleeving up my sling to take down the unsuspecting Goliaths and their broken decks. Reality bore out a more median narrative, demonstrating what happens if David simply misses his shot and gets smashed by Goliath over and over. Rather ironically, my results in pushing past this fallacy were nearly immediate. The first large event I played with Grixis Delver in Legacy was SCG Worcester in 2018. Many Delver players far better than me were attending the event, and the nightmare scenario of embarrassing myself in the mirror was very much in play.

Instead, I won the whole thing. Many of the best players in the room, of whom I was certainly not one, made deep runs with Grixis Delver, and I even played some solid opponents on the deck where I skillfully won the die roll and drew better at parity. Still, all of those “best players in the room” lost before I did, and while two players actively better than me at the game at the time made top 8 with the deck too, I didn’t even have to play them at all. My three top 8 opponents, including the finals, were all on non-Delver decks and I eventually took home the trophy.

A hard lesson in just how wrong I was for years on end, but hard to be too mad about it while hoisting my first trophy. Playing the best deck even if you are worse at it than other folks in the room is just correct so much more often than not.

In my coaching days there was one single exception I was willing to make to the “play the best deck” mandate, and that is large deltas in how tilted you get when losing with the deck. I believe there exists a threshold of tilt that comes from losing with a deck that is particularly miserable in how it loses that puts your tournament more in jeopardy than just playing a weaker deck. Even these cases are really extreme, and the example I use for myself is the Hogaak deck in Modern in 2019. I got the opportunity to play the deck for high stakes roughly two or three times before it was banned and only acted on that opportunity once. The issue was I just hated the deck. Winning with it was not that fun and losing with it was downright miserable, I felt like I hardly played at all! Still, it was so clearly the best deck and the stakes of the team tournament convinced me to try to push through my mental game challenges anyway.

It was genuinely the most miserable tournament I ever played. After an 8-0 start we took a few losses and from there the tournament crashed and burned for us through the rest of day 2. The fact is that the losses were so miserable that I physically could not shake them off and get back in it. A personal flaw that ideally could be trained out, but I had not learned this lesson yet at the time and didn’t even know it could get so bad. I did not play Hogaak again at any other events, but I also didn’t do very much winning either before it was banned. Still a few min cash finishes where I left the events without hating myself were worth it to me at the time to not have to play Hogaak.

All told, this is a very personal metric to use but is one I accepted from coaching clients. I would still expect this to come up fairly rarely if at all if your goal is to win. Non-games happen all the time with every deck, so one or two instances of a non-game is not expressing the same thing as having unrecoverable tilt from the way in which a deck loses.

Ultimately, I emphasized to all of my coaching clients in the very first session that I am coaching you on how to win. If you want coaching on a specific deck or a specific niche archetype there exist communities and coaches for that, but my experience is aligned around how to give yourself the best chance to win events and consistently perform at a variety of different events with a variety of different decks for a variety of different formats. The most important first lesson to that end is selecting the deck that gives you the best chance to win. It’s not the deck you played the most, not the deck that’s most like something you played before, not the deck that would make you feel really clever if you won with it instead of taking the “easy way out”, but the deck that gives you the objectively best chance to win based on the information and evidence available to you from all sources. Identifying the best deck is at least an article of its own but, importantly, most of the agency you have over your performance is at the deckbuilding table. Choosing to play the best deck in the format is a shockingly difficult first step for many competitive players even when it is clear and apparent what that deck is. Don’t let that be you! Thanks for reading!

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There’s a reason the best players are playing more Riftbound than you, and testing differently.

By Jon Rosum

The most common question that I get asked in coaching / in person is “what should I do to get better at Riftbound?” and while this question requires a decent amount of breakdown I think there are quite a few actionable steps that players at ANY caliber can take to heart and find themselves to improve at the game when you don’t have a decade-and-a-half of high level TCG experience. 

The first answer I give and one that applies to most people is that you need to be playing more games and consuming more content. When you don’t have several years of intuition to guide you it is very easy to get easily overwhelmed and flustered in difficult positions because you don’t know how to dissect the games. I know Nexus Nights is a very common way for people to get their weekly intake of Riftbound but it is important to get a takeaway from EVERY game / match of Riftbound that you play because once you start to cognitively think about the game at that level you will just get better naturally as you piece more and more of the puzzle together to get to the end result of improving. The other way I recommend to increase “volume” is playing online via TCGArena or RiftAtlas and applying the same takeaway logic to those games and eventually start scrimming against your friends or participating in online tournaments / the Runes and Rift Ranked ladder. Once you start increasing the volume of matches you play each week and getting takeaways from those matches and games you will find yourself improving at a very steady pace but don’t expect instant results. 

The second part of the “volume” equation is that you need to be consuming content from people who are better than you. There are so many pros that make very quality content and even just watching a stream / feature match actively and pausing between every play / thought / mulligan and begin to think to yourself “why did that make that play?” This requires actual attention-to-detail along with being somewhat difficult but even just passively watching pros play or watching high level matches will allow you to get into the “mind of a pro” and start you on the path of getting better at the game. Volume is an issue that doesn’t get fixed overnight and I want to say it is very easy to get discouraged on your path to getting better but if you are passionate about Riftbound that will carry you as it’s just all about pursuing a passion and getting to the next level. 

The second response to that question on a very basic level is “master the fundamentals” and watch how that skill carries you to victory. Mastering Riftbound is very hard, the game is impossibly difficult and it is very easy to let one blunder just completely derail the game which can be a very tough pill to swallow. This ties in quite a bit to the “volume” piece of watching professional Riftbound players play but it is very true. This can be broken down to even just watching your local Nexus Night Hero play and try and understand what a winning position is and breaking down the game into small bite sized pieces. What I like to do is that when I’m going first I like to lead the tempo by breaking down each game by going “how am I getting to two points then how am I getting to four points…” and continue that until you get to the final turn and try to win the game. Tempo is incredibly important in Riftbound and one of the core fundamentals you need to understand and then master to be a high level Riftbound player. Riftbound is incredibly complicated and this point is one that causes an incredible amount of confusion and headache but it is VERY important to level up as a player. The inverse to this is also true and learning how to play from behind is another skill that is hard to master as it is not possible to level up if you’re only good at playing from ahead. Each deck in the game should have a plan at both maneuvering being ahead and utilizing that tempo AND figuring out how to regain tempo when you’re going second and playing to these strengths is a skill that requires a lot of intent in order to truly understand and master. When I give the answer of mastering the fundamentals the point I always start is by breaking down the game into smaller pieces and then learning how to play from both ahead and behind. 

Fundamentals don’t just develop overnight either, this might even be MORE frustrating than increasing your volume of games as it is a lot harder to become a well-rounded player while it is generally easier to increase the volume of games. Fundamental mastery requires a lot of mindfulness and persistence as it will be an incredibly hard journey EVEN for people who come from other TCGs. This is one that you will notice getting better and better as time progresses and while it is hard to master it is so worth it because you will level up dramatically once you start working towards your passion and desire to be a better Riftbound player.

Actively becoming better at Riftbound is a very hard journey and one that starts with a tremendous amount of passion. I hope these tips resonate with some of you as they are the most common questions that I get when I am approached both in coaching and while in person at events. At the end of the day remember that we are here to have fun and play a TCG, don’t rage at your opponent when you lose and instead reflect inwards and channel that energy into something productive and if you master your mental you are well on the path to becoming a much better Riftbound player. 

Mental mastery is hard, be kind and continue to battle in this wonderful game. Next up for me is the DSG Bootcamp in Poland before the upcoming Regional Championship in Stuttgart. I will be deep in the mines and I hope to meet some of you there. 

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